If the problem was just with the file association, then am I right in thinking that *all* my scripts would have been broken, not just the ones using @ARGV? Any further advice much appreciated!

No, only the programs that use @ARGV would suffer. Assuming the problem is that your file association says "when you run script.pl, execute 'perl <scriptname>'". That means that if you type:

c:\> script.pl foo bar baz
[download]

What gets run is actually

perl script.pl
[download]

So if a program doesn't use @ARGV, it doesn't care it's being omitted.

Does that make sense?

-- Dan